What goofs have you noticed throughout your playing of Doom 3? That is, when the special effects failed to fool you because something didn't really work.

Here's one: at the alpha labs beginning, behind the first level door there are 2 z-sec, one patrolling and another hiding. If you kill the hiding one with a grenade, then walk in, the game will still trigger a z-sec alert sound, even though they're all dead. The sound of course was supposed to accompany the waking up of the hidden z-sec.

Another one: I'm quite sure I've seen lost souls cast shadows from their flames. That's dumb.

If you look in the hell maps, due to the horrible lack of hellish light-emitting props in Doom 3 (save for candles, glowing lava crevices, flaming torsos and satanic runes), there are lots of places where point light appears without any identifiable source. I thought that's a no-no for level design.

Why do the headless zombies have voices? Why does Theresa Chasar still have a head even after a lost sould breaks out of her head?

Have you witnessed other effect failures? Note that Doom 3 is quite tidy though.

I personally hate the gib effects in Doom 3. The brains just pop right out, fully intact. That, or the character turns into a skinless skeleton after shooting it with any weapon after they have died. It's just really awkward and doesn't make any sense!

GoatLord said:
I personally hate the gib effects in Doom 3. The brains just pop right out, fully intact. That, or the character turns into a skinless skeleton after shooting it with any weapon after they have died. It's just really awkward and doesn't make any sense!

I've always interpretted the easy gibbing as an effect of Hell merging with our reality.

One of the worst examples of a failed effect is a trap where you walk over to an empty elevator shaft with the door open and an imp teleports in behind you, presumably to trap you up against the edge, except the teleportation process takes like 4 full seconds. You would think that woulda came up during playtesting and they'd have just scrapped it since there's no way for it to work.

Not sure if really an effects fail, or if this is really how it works, but in sme areas you'll have a brightly lit room, but if you walk behind some standup wall or pillar it is completely black behind it with no light coming in from the surrounding light.

That sounds more like the fault of the engine, whose use of so-called stencil shading paints black shadows on everything. Well, that and the fact that the shadows aren't particularly dynamic, in that many of them don't respond to a light source that would presumably change their shape and position.

When wraiths "shift out of existence" they are really just turning invisible. They are completely harmless while invisible, but they are also completely unbeatable as the player cannot hurt them or even touch them while they are in this state.

Megamur said:
Off-topic, but are wraiths vulnerable to any attacks while invisible? Can they be damaged while shifting between visible and invisible?

As stated, wraiths are invulnerable to all attacks while invisible. Nonetheless, they can be easily killed by any weapon as they shift in and out of existence. In fact it is this momentary pause that makes them one of the easiest monsters to defeat in the entire game.

Indeed, wraiths are a neat design (visually), but absolutely horrid in terms of combat capabilities. They might've been more effective (and cooler) if they'd stuck with their initial design of forming out of a swarm of bugs.

Megamur said:
All of the death animations in DOOM 3 were lame. They just ragdolled and evaporated. Killing a DOOM 3 mancubus just isn't near as satisfying as killing a DOOM II one.

This is why I don't like ragdoll physics. While it can produce hilarious results, nothing will beat a scripted death animation.

One of my favorite comparisons is the death of a human enemy in any modern shooter with ragdoll physics to the scripted death animations in GoldenEye. GE had a ton of animations specifically for deaths, which were based on where the guard was hit (basically the same purpose ragdolls serve). You'll never see an enemy grab his throat with both hands, drop to his knees, and slump over dead in a modern game purely because of laziness; ragdolls are "good enough."

Dragonsbrethren, I'm gonna have to disagree with you on "nothing will beat a scripted death animation." In my thread about the future of gibs, I talked about how eventually characters will be fully destructible on a per-vertex basis, allowing for unique, memorable deaths depending on the weapon used and the ballistics involved. I personally think that when you can kill a character in any number of ways, combined with increasingly realistic physics, it'll FINALLY look cooler than scripted animation.

In my thread about the future of gibs, I talked about how eventually characters will be fully destructible on a per-vertex basis, allowing for unique, memorable deaths depending on the weapon used and the ballistics involved.

I think by the time we can do that, voxel tech will already be the standard, and doing damage to an enemy will be as simple as severing chunks of voxels from its body.

GoatLord said:
Well, that and the fact that the shadows aren't particularly dynamic, in that many of them don't respond to a light source that would presumably change their shape and position.

Don't make things up that aren't true and display them as facts.

Clonehunter said:
Not sure if really an effects fail, or if this is really how it works, but in sme areas you'll have a brightly lit room, but if you walk behind some standup wall or pillar it is completely black behind it with no light coming in from the surrounding light.

That is a weakness of the engine's lighting system. There are ways to deal with it though. Like ambient light shaders that some people has worked on adding.

Anyway. Because of the light engine using a stencil shadow technique, there is no light bouncing. This results in that polygons that don't recieve any light at all. Or sections of polygons that are shadowed and otherwise are only being hit by a single light (or if the shadow blocks all lights hitting the surface the shadow is drawn on) there is no light information on the surface and the engine displays it as pitch black.

Now. ways you can deal with this are as follow.

1. You can give all textures a light level. Making them effectively glow in the dark. By doing this to all of them, you can artificially make the game draw these dark corners etc as something other than pitch black. Though this makes it impossible to make any area actually pitch black. Also the textures will look pretty bad with no actual light direction information coming on to them making them look extremely flat seeing as the diffuse texture only really contain colors for the normalmap. (Hexen: Edge of Chaos did this)

2. Like I believe ETQW did, give the game an ambient light level that is set up globally. Again, this has the added flaw that your entire level will be more or less uniformly lit. It makes it difficult to make a map with significantly differing light levels in different areas.

3. Use ambient light shaders and place in the scenes. There are already some in Doom3. Though they are pretty bad. Some others has been made by modders.

There are several other things you can do as a level designer to make the shadows less jarring. Though mostly it is about very careful placing of lights in the world.

Dragonsbrethren said:
This is why I don't like ragdoll physics. While it can produce hilarious results, nothing will beat a scripted death animation.

Yes, I too miss the days where dead enemies would display a canned animation when they died and just kind of float in the air or clip through objects if they were on a staircase, near a wall, or on any non-perfectly-flat surface. Wait, no I don't. Overly complex death animations ("enemy grab his throat with both hands, drop to his knees, and slump over dead") are unnecessary and just kind of waste time anyways. Save that sort of thing for "special events".

Actually, if anyone actually bothered to play Wolfenstein 2009, that had both scripted death animations and ragdolls, which made killing Nazis very amusing. It was also possible to blow/chop off limbs and heads. (Everyone should play that game. It's way better than the reviews say.)

GoatLord said:
Dragonsbrethren, I'm gonna have to disagree with you on "nothing will beat a scripted death animation." In my thread about the future of gibs, I talked about how eventually characters will be fully destructible on a per-vertex basis, allowing for unique, memorable deaths depending on the weapon used and the ballistics involved.

Megamur said:
Isn't this kind of what Soldier of Fortune was entirely about?

I had so much fun with that. Like there was nothing quite like shooting off both of a guys legs before he hit the ground. :D

Granted this has been further developed in more modern games by now. Like Dead Island, where you can cut off the arms of the zombies, making them less dangerous in their attacks for instance. But also letting you cut off chunks here and there on their bodies.

Xeros612 said:
Yes, I too miss the days where dead enemies would display a canned animation when they died and just kind of float in the air or clip through objects if they were on a staircase, near a wall, or on any non-perfectly-flat surface.

Coopersville said:
You can have both. Left 4 Dead 2 does it famously, and so does Red Orchestra 2. Obviously anything that uses the Euphoria Engine as well.

Never took notice to it in L4D2, but I've only played it a handful of times. But yeah, that's basically what I want. Do a decent death animation, then turn the corpse into a ragdoll so it can land in a more "realistic" position.

GoatLord said:
Not a glitch, but the way those little spiders die is absolute shit. Seems really lazy, they just turn into a pile of mush. Really lazy when the archnotron sprites had complex death animations.

the spiders themselves are shit. small critters that can still bite you to death, simply annoying. were these supposed to replace arachnotrons?

Megamur said:
All of the death animations in DOOM 3 were lame. They just ragdolled and evaporated. Killing a DOOM 3 mancubus just isn't near as satisfying as killing a DOOM II one.

they evaporated for performance reasons with all these corpses around. mods like nitro's doom keep them where they are. the doom2 manc bursting and falling like a bloody sack is still much better.